For a Christmas card, I photographed a family for the second year in a row to make a completely different composite, this time with three dogs as Harry Potter, Hermione, and Ron, and the three adults as villains. It turned out great, I loved it. My client said people were blown away by it. They went wild, for it. WILD. "I was told, 'We won Christmas,'" she said. So that's a good response, amirite?

But I decided to make one just for me, featuring the little pittie puppy Izzy as Harry. And this time, I created a "speed edit." First of all, you can see how perfect she looks with the glasses on and the wand in her mouth, looking straight on to me. She was that way for about three seconds. You gotta be quick, I'm telling you. Pulled out everything for that one.

But back to the speed edit. That's where you record your screen as you do whatever you're doing in Photoshop, and then speed it up so you don't go through all the monotony of getting all the details. This speed edit represents about 45 minutes and it looks pretty finished but I probably spent another two hours completing it. And it does not show cutting out Harry/Izzy, which is kind of time consuming in its own right. But completely worth it.

And then I went to Universal Studios to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and I just had to slip in Hogwarts. And I changed the coloring again.

So enjoy the speed edit and see some of what it takes to create a composite. This one is actually a pretty simple one. The one in the video shows just three images it took to make it. I've made for more complex ones before, ones that literally took days. But this one was fairly simple in compositing time.